Koen Delvaux's blog

Don't buy cheap lightbulbs for your car

2012-01-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had to go to the vehicle inspection with my car. Sadly enough, the headlights didn't pass the test. If you look at the picture of the lightbeam projected on my garage door, you can see why. The light to the right is diffracting a lot of the light upwards, which would blind oncoming cars.

When you look at this closeup, you can see the diffraction pattern even clearer. Several trips between automobile inspection and the car dealership didn't bring us a solution. The conclusion was that the whole headlight unit was faulty and needed (expensive) replacement.

When I got home, I swapped the left and right lightbulbs. Apparently, the problem now also switched sides. When I inspected the faulty lightbulb more closely, it appeared to have a molten reflector. When you look at the dark area in the top, you can see clearly that on the far side of the picture it seems like the reflector material has dripped down a bit. Because of the irregular diffraction pattern this caused, the mechanics couldn't adjust the light beam correctly.

This happened with a dirtcheap nobrand lightbulb. I guess I'll be sticking with Philips lightbulbs from now on. The funny thing is that neither the mechanic nor the people at the technical inspection where able to point in the direction of the solution. If I wouldn't have found this out by accident, I would have been in for an expensive headlight unit replacement.

Lexus: it's a bug, not a feature. And it needs open source.

2011-12-17T04:36:00.000-08:00

This post is to pass on some information to Lexus about a bug in one of their cars. Contrary to what customer service would like you to believe: it's not a feature or a malfunction, but a software bug.

Description

This is how I found my car this morning: locked, front window lowered 75%, rear window lowered 50%. The evening before, I left the car locked with the windows closed. The first explanation for this problem that comes to mind is user error. As Lexus answered on Twitter (for which they deserve credit: good monitoring!) the car has a personalized setting that allows the windows to be rolled down with the unlock button held. Maybe someone inadvertently pressed the buttons of the key fob, which was in the house.

Problem not reproducable

I tried this and indeed: holding down the unlock button rolls down the windows. But in that case, the car is also unlocked. In my situation, the car was still locked. A second try learns that by keeping the lock button pressed the car can become locked and the windows partially closed again. Just let go of the lock button at the right moment. But even in the unlikely event that these button presses all occurred accidentally overnight whilst the keys were in the house, it can not explain the situation. Using the remote, the windows all start and stop at the same time. This brings them into a position that either the rear window is always opened more than the front window (which is longer) or in a position that the car is unlocked. In my situation the front window was lowered more then the rear window and the car was locked.

Why this is not a malfunction

Computers don't just do things by themselves. If the computer in the car lowered the windows to this predefined position, it is because someone someday programmed a routine that does exactly this. The reason why is is programmed can be anything. Just some ideas to what may have gone through the engineer's mind:
- escape-position in case the car is driven into a lake
- anti-buffeting position in case the car is driven fast with the windows in a position that could cause dangerously high forces on the window glass
- post-crash position to let airbag fumes escape without compromising head support for rear passengers

Maybe a sensor malfunction triggered the software routine. After all, it was a stormy night when this happened. Maybe it is rare combination of values that triggered a bug in the software to enter the 'lowered windows' routine. In any case, it is something the manufacturer should try to diagnose and correct. Not something that the user of the product should have to have replaced in a dealership.

Lessons to learn

This incident shows that many products are highly complex systems where nobody knows what software is inside them and how this software is working. In a world where companies build products using a complex network of subcontractors of subcontractors, we seldom know how to diagnose or fix these kind of problems.
In my opinion, it should be a legal requirement that all software related to safety is made open source so problems can not be swiped under the carpet and errors are more likely to be spotted before accidents happen. I don't trust the software in my car. It lowers my windows without anyone knowing why. Who knows what it can do to my braking system? Yes, the problem is probably known in the Lexus incident database, where it now will have a +1 in front of it. But Lexus might not be able to solve it and therefore would choose to contain it (assumption from my side). Because the engineer who programmed the routine can not be retraced. Because the subcontractor is not paid to investigate this. Because the unit already has been approved and tested, thus the design can't be faulty. The only solution to this deadlock in industrial design is open source software and open data on incident management.

Also in the car industry the era of bespoke software is over. Let's ask the manufacturers to open up their source code.

Cyanogenmod 7 for Nexus One: a must-have

2011-12-04T01:12:00.000-08:00

The Nexus One is now almost 2 years old, making it a dinosaur in mobile phone land. It's main limitation is the limited amount of RAM available. Over time, the preinstalled Google Apps have grown so large that it is almost impossible to install anything else. A few weeks ago I even had to uninstall the Flash player because I kept getting 'memory full' warnings.

The Cyanogenmod solves this problem. The first solution is that the build is much smaller than the official firmware. The way it partitions the available RAM leaves a lot more room for applications. The second solution is that by rooting your phone (through the installation of Cyanogenmod) you enable the installation of S2E. This application is available in the Android Market and allows you to use a separate partition on the SD card as an extension to the internal memory. The main reason memory is a problem on these early Android devices is that it is not possible to move or install system applications to the SD card. System applications are not only Gmail, Calendar and contacts, but also Google Maps, Google Plus and Flash player are large applications that can't be moved to the SD card. The S2E application solved this.
To install the firmware I followed the guide at http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Nexus_One:_Full_Update_Guide. There are 2 things that should be added to this guide:
- You should first install the Java SE SDK, then the Android SDK and then the fastboot tool
- After installing the Android SDK, you need to start the program SDK manager in C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk and install the additional "platform-tools", which creates the directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools
- The fastboot.exe file shoudl be installed in this directory and you should run it from this directory.
If you don't follow the above steps before installing fastboot, it will complain about a missing dll AdbWinApi.dll. (note: I added these steps in the Wiki, so hopefully they remain there)
Another thing that didn't work for me is booting in the ClockWorkMod Recovery. I tried the Amon_Ra Recovery instead and this worked flawlessly.

The result
I'm very happy that I installed this Cyanogenmod

The phone is much faster now. The UI is just as snappy as it was the first day I had the phone.
There is loads of memory available for applications. I didn't even need the extra S2E partition to move the system apps to SD, which means they still can run form the faster internal memory.
There is a lot more flexibility. I love features like being able to control what the trackball alerting light does. Also the ability to configure the SD card as the default installation location for new apps is great. And there's much more.
There is aven a FM radio. The hardware was sitting unused in the N1 all of this time and Cyanogen now unlocks this!

Maybe in a few weeks we can even switch to Ice Cream Sandwich, the newest version of Android. Although this will not be released for the Nexus One by Google, a team of developers on XDA Developers is working on a build for the N1. You can follow their progress here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1366897

Logitech wireless mouse, keyboard and webcam tested

2011-10-20T02:03:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago Logitech gave me a wireless mouse / keyboard combo to test. I was sceptic at first, but after a while it grew on me.
In my office I use a wired Apple keyboard just for the sheer pleasure of typing on the chiclet-like keys. My previous wireless keyboard was a Microsoft combo with traditional fat keys with a long travel. The wireless failed often, leading to typing mistakes, missed letters and ssssssssssometimes unwanted repeated keystrokes. Not fun, so I went back to a wired keyboard.

The Logitech keyboard is from the new "colour collection" line. It is available as a combo with a matching mouse and webcam. Luckily I didn't get the pink one, but I'm sure there's a market for these fancy designs. The mouse is much too small for my hands. I'm more used to bigger and sturdier mice that give greater precision in handling. But it works fine without any wireless issues. The keyboard is compact yet comfortable, although the keys are spaced a bit too far apart to my linking. It's nicer to type on then a traditional deep stroke keyboard, but not so nice as the Apple keyboard of course.
After using the combo in my office for a while I switched back to the typing pleasure of my Apple keyboard and installed the Logitech mouse and keyboard on the children's laptop. And I must say: it's a very good match when used on a laptop. There are no cables to install and the compact mouse and keyboard don't take too much room on the desk. My children now use this continuously instead of the laptop's built-in keyboard and trackpad and they don't want to switch back.

The one thing I'm keeping for myself is the Logitech C270 webcam that came in the box. My old webcam was an ancient model with very bad low light properties. This new generation of inexpensive webcams deliver crisp 720p HD images even in lower light and they also have a built in microphone. My Skype sessions definitely became more fun with this unit!
As a sidenote: all of this stuff was tested and installed on a Mac, Windows 7 and Windows 8 and worked without issues. For Windows 8 you do have to manually install the Windows 7 driver for the uni-receiver, but this is normal since Windows 8 is yet unreleased.

Windows 8 rocks!

2011-09-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this on an old HP530 laptop. Until yesterday, it was an unusably slow machine with it's 1GB of RAM and Windows Vista installed. Now that I've installed Windows 8 Developer Preview it simply rocks.

Installation
You can download the Windows 8 developer preview from the Microsoft website. After you download it, be sure to check the file for download errors. My first copy was damaged, so I had to reload the file. To check for download errors, you need to calculate the SHA-1 checksum of the file and compare it to the SHA-1 given on the download website. To calculate the SHA-1 checksum you will have to download the FCIV tool from Microsoft. When you're certain your copy is OK, you can burn the iso to a CD or create a bootable USB stick with the Windows 7 USB download tool from Microsoft.

Metro Interface
The default interface you see in Windows 8 has nothing to do with the classic desktop. You will be presented with the beautiful Metro interface designed for tablets. It provides a simplified computing experience that will suffice for 90% of users, whether they are on a tablet of laptop device. I showed it to my children and they started playing with the different tiles just by relying on their intuition. The tiles are also 'live', in the sense that they behave like widgets, showing e.g. the weather forecast on the weather application tile.
Also things like 'settings' have been incorporated in a very nice interface, both visually pleasing and with good usability. Power users can switch to the old desktop-with-taskbar interface to be able to run tradional Windows applications like Word and Photoshop.

Internet Explorer 10
Actually there are 2 versions of this browser installed. The desktop version is nothing special, but the version you get in the Metro interface really surprised me.
When you're browsing you don't see any browser chrome. You're just interacting with the website in fullscreen. Once you click the right mousebutton on a non-clickable area in the website, the chrome pops up. At the bottom you see an address bar, at the top you get an overview of your open tabs by showing large thumbnails of the tabs. Very nice and much clearer than the small favicon-with-text tabs you get in a normal desktop browser. When you start typing in the address bar, the main screen of the browser shows you suggestions based on what you previously visited and what Microsoft's search engine Bing is guessing. This is a very nice form of autocomplete.

Compatibility
Windows has a rich past, which means it supports a wide selection of hardware. In my case, the videocard of my HP530 wasn't supported by Windows 8, resulting in a screen resolution of only 800x600. But after downloading the Windows 7 driver, it just installed and worked immediately, even without rebooting. If this means earlier windows drivers will be compatible with Windows 8, a lot of hardware and accessories like webcams and game controllers will still be usable. With the small footprint of the OS (it runs perfectly fine on 1GB RAM with a 5 year old CPU) this backwards compatibility will further drive down prices of computer hardware like tablets and mini laptops. This will let Windows 8 based devices take the market by storm.

Flash
It seems like Adobe Flash is really on it's way out. The Metro version of Internet Explorer no longer includes Flash but relies on HTML 5 to display video's in websites. This is done to ensure that the Metro interface will run nicely even on low-end devices like cheap tablets. Now that browser implementations of HTML 5 are getting better and development tools are starting to mature, it won't be long before the proprietary Flash platform is (finally) replaced with the open technology of HTML 5.

Conclusion
This is a serious competitor to IOS and Android. The fact that you can have 2 computers in one (tablet UI and desktop UI) will prove to be really valuable for users that don't want to invest in 2 devices. Combine that with the developer ecosystem of Microsoft and Metro applications will soon be conquering the world.

Samsung Galaxy Gio crash vibrates, pauses, vibrates and freezes

2011-05-19T03:16:00.000-07:00

UPDATE:
The device appears to be grey import from Germany. Only the German firmware has this problem. It is now on it's way to the service center for a firmware upgrade. Fingers crossed & kudos for Samsung Belgium for investigating this issue, whilst it should be dealt with by Samsung Germany.

UPDATE2:

Latest firmware does not fix this problem. It occurs less than in the beginning, also probably because wifi is now off most of the time.

UPDATE3:

Firmware installed on 11/11/2011 with build number GINGERBREAD.XXKPS fixes the problems. At last! Make sure to upgrade your firmware using Samsung Kies.

I'm writing this up so other people facing the same issue with the Samsung Galaxy Gio phone can find this information via Google.

I bought a Galaxy Gio for my wife. The Gio is just released by Samsung, so it's in it's first firmware version. There is a bug in the firmware which makes te device unusable. In this post, I try to diagnose this bug.

Symptoms

When you're surfing the web, refreshing email (or have email pushed to you in the background) all of a sudden your phone freezes, vibrates once, pauzes for 2 seconds and then vibrates 3 times. Depending on how much luck you have, the phone closes the application that was accessing the internet or it keeps doing the vibrate thing whilst the screen and all buttons are frozen until eternity. In that case, the only solution is to hold down the power button during 5 seconds to power off and reboot the phone (or to remove the battery).
This happens every 1-30 minutes that you're actively using the phone. The less you use the internet, the less the crash occurs. The more stable your connection is, the less the crash occurs.

Tests performed

To check where the problem lies, I restored the phone to factory settings. It would not crash, no matter what I did if I didn't configure an internet setting.
Next, I configured a Wifi connection and started browsing. Within 1 minute the browser crashed.
As a third step, I restored the phone to factory settings again and configured a gprs access point. Within 1 minute of browsing the phone crashed. In other tries, it took 10 minutes.
As a fourth and fifth test I repeated the above tests (with GPRS and WiFi) but I configured a Google account, opened up the gMail application and clicked on 'refresh'. On both instances, the phone crashed on some occasions.
I noticed that when I introduced instability in the connection (disconnect WiFi router during test, move to location with bad GPRS reception during test) that crashes occured far more frequently

Log file analysis

An analysis of the logfiles learned that a SIGSEGV event is thrown by both the browser and gMail (and probably other apps that use internet if I would have installed and tested them. I've had the same thing happening with the weather applet and even the clock, which probably syncs it's setting to the linked Google account).
The SIGSEGV event means that the application is adressing memory that it has no (longer) access to. It always occurs after the following lines in the logfiles:

:06:12.732 I/ActivityThread( 1520): queueIdle
:06:12.742 V/ActivityThread( 1520): Reporting idle of ActivityRecord{4a301bd8 token=android.os.BinderProxy@4a3012a0 {com.android.browser/com.android.browser.BrowserActivity}} finished=false
:06:12.742 W/ActivityNative( 1520): send ACTIVITY_IDLE_TRANSACTION
:06:12.742 W/ActivityNative( 172): RCV ACTIVITY_IDLE_TRANSACTION
:06:14.002 I/browser ( 1520): Console: [object Object] http://www.google.com/m?client=ms-android-samsung&source=android-home:451
:06:14.232 I/DEBUG ( 1441): *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
:06:14.232 I/DEBUG ( 1441): Build fingerprint: 'samsung/GT-S5660/GT-S5660/GT-S5660:2.2.1/FROYO/XXKC4:user/release-keys'
:06:14.232 I/DEBUG ( 1441): pid: 1520, tid: 1530 >>> com.android.browser <<<
:06:14.232 I/DEBUG ( 1441): signal 11 (SIGSEGV), fault addr 41f80020

It looks like the application (in this case, the browser) has requested data from the internet. This request is terminated by the system due to a change in connection state (or packet loss or some other hick-up in the connection). The application keeps a reference/pointer to the data it requested and thinks that the data has arrived and wants to access it. However, this pointer is invalid since the system already cleaned up the connection. Possible causes could be:

the system doesn't notify the application that the request is killed
the application doesn't update it's state correctly (which is less likely, since several applications exhibit the same behavior)

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of Android or Samsung firmware, this is just deduction based upon general sw engineering knowledge and the data in the log file. This diagnosis can just as well be wrong.

Conclusion

Samsung left a huge bug in the firmware related to data connectivity. I can not understand that this firmware actually shipped. Don't they even do basic testing? I gave the phone to my wife and she told me that it's broken within 10 minutes of receiving it. Shouldn't a Samsung engineer have at least the same basic testing skills than an average consumer?

Samsung, solve this one very quickly or be prepared to see enormous return rates on the Galaxy Gio!

(reactions from Samsung and updates will be posted in this same blogpost)

Why the Microsoft - Nokia partnership is a great move

2011-02-12T00:36:00.000-08:00

Nokia and Microsoft have announced they will work together in the smartphone market. I think this is a brilliant move that will help the acceleration of the mobile industry and is the only move that both companies could make to achieve success.
Instead of reacting to every tweet out there that says this partnership is combining the worst in software and hardware and thus is destined for failure, let me explain to you in a few paragraphs why I think this partnership is set for success.

Microsoft has a long history in mobile devices. Their Windows Mobile phones were the first viable smartphones out there. Together with manufacturer HTC they opened up the market and pretty much owned it for a while. The problems started when they underestimated the importance of this market. As a consequence, they didn't invest enough R&D money in Windows Mobile and soon competitors like Apple and Android took the market. Manufacturers like HTC had no alternative but to switch to Android.

Nokia has an even longer history in mobile devices. They have always been excellent at finding product-market fit, something that defines the success of every consumer company. When the computer guys entered the mobile devices market (Microsoft, Google and Apple), they did not aim for product-market fit, but they aimed at creating a new market. And they successfully did so. Nokia could not neglect their existing market and tried several strategies to have a foot in both the traditional mobile phone market and the new, app driven, smarthphone market. Symbian, S40, S60, MeeGo and OviStore are all tactics that fit in these strategies. Nokia failed horribly in executing their strategy for the same reason as Microsoft failed: they underestimated the importance of the new market. As a consequence, they held on too long to their existing ecosystem.

In the meanwhile both companies have taken drastic measures. Microsoft abandonned Windows Mobile and poured a ton of money in the R&D for a new mobile OS. The result is Windows Phone 7. And I can tell you: it is fantastic. Not because is has a better UI than the iPhone or because it has greater multitasking than Android. It is fantastic because it is oriented at the average consumer and not at whizzkids. Those consumers also want in on the smartphone deal, but they don't want any of the complexity. Try the OS (or even better, give it to your mother in law) and you will realize this is a winner. Nokia already prepared the exit of Symbian by creating MeeGo. But they realized things needed to go faster. Android was not an option since this would mean Nokia would be commoditized between all of the HTC and Chinese manufactured phones. As a market leader (yes, they're still the market leader in mobile phones) they have to capitalize on their installed base and this can only be done by creating a closed and polished offering. Failing to create a stunning mobile OS themselves, they only had 1 option left: find a partner. And as it happens to be, Microsoft is the only party out there that has such an OS.

For Microsoft, Nokia is the ideal hardware manufacturer. They have worldwide distribution, they have engineers that can create hardware to fit the Windows Phone OS and they have a compatible brand image. If Microsoft had been 2 years earlier they could have gone with an open partnership strategy like what they did with MS DOS and Windows, but with Android already having taken this market this is no longer possible.

Together, both parties can bring the best of both worlds (a great mobile OS and fantastic hardware and distribution capabilities) to the market. This is not only a win for Nokia and Microsoft, but also for the mobile industry. We now have Windows Phone as a viable contender in the marketplace. Microsoft-Nokia will offer a platform strategy that falls between the closed Apple model and the open Android model. This is good news for both consumers and for the mobile applications market.

Stretching your Vibram fivefinger when they are too small

2011-02-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

Fivefingers is a minimalistic type of shoe from Vibram. It emulates the physiology an feeling of barefoot running whilst offering protection to the soles of your feet. But they are really hard to get a good fit.

Vibram has detailed instructions on their site on how to measure your feet and order the correct size. My feet are just between two sizes, so I ordered the larger size, just like the website instructed.
When I got my Vibram's (these are a pair of Sprints) it was clear that they were way too large. I had over 1 cm of spare room at the heel when I slid my toes forward. Thanks to the return policy of www.zehenschuhe.de I exchanged them for a smalller size. I was quite disappointed to find out that one size down was now too small. My second toe couldn't fully extend and when stretching my toes they were clearly limited in their movement by the toe pockets.

If you want to find the right size for your Vibram Fivefingers, you have to put your feet flat on the ground. Then you grab the part of the rubber that extends slightly to the front of your toes. When you move the end of the rubber a bit back and forth, you will feel it touching and releasing the tip of your toe. When you leave the rubber alone, it should be right in front of the tip of your toe, with about 1mm play.

Luckily, it is quite easy to achieve a perfect fit by extending the toes that are not long enough. To do this, you have to stretch the rubber real hard. I used a socket wrench which I crammed into the shoe with some more objects behind it to achieve a maximal stretch. Don't be afraid to overdo it, since after the operation the rubber will come back to almost it's original size. Depending on the amount of tension on the rubber I have been able to gain a maximum of about 5mm in length gain. Other attempts only yielded about 2mm of stretch.
Whilst the shoe is stretched you have to heat the rubber with a lighter:

hold the flame against the rubber, not just under the rubber (the tip of the flame would be way to hot)
move the flame over all of the rubber that is elegible for stretching, starting from the forefoot area until the top of the toe
keep doing this for 5 minutes (I know: this is long). The rubber will smell and fumes will come off. Don't worry: this is the internal links in the rubber that are breaking and will result in some amount of stretch (you can't actually melt vulcanised rubber, it's more breaking down links inside it)
when you're done heating, put the heated area in cold water for 30 seconds. Leave the shoe under tension for another 5 minutes and then move on to the second shoe

You can do this for all toes that need extension. I started by extending the second toe by about 5mm. I walked around on the shoes for a day like that, still feeling a bit cramped on the big toes. The next day I extended those with about 3mm. When walking around like that they almost felt perfect, but the little toe was just being rubbed a bit by the shoe whilst walking. So I stretched those by a very small amount, around 1mm.

My Vibram Fivefingers are now perfect and I can't wait to really run longer distances in them!

How to stitch and shorten a pair of motorcycle trousers.

2011-01-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

What a funny subject. But for many motorcyclists, getting a good fit from their trousers can be a real problem. I found out the hard way, but also found a simple method to shorten them.

I bought a pair of IXS Tobago trousers. What makes them special is that as far as I know they are the only fully protective Jeans-style Cordura trousers on the market. Other motorcycle trousers are not really suitable for casual wearing due to their explicit styling. The only alternative is Kevlar reinforced motorcycle jeans, but they fail to offer the same level of protection that heavy Cordura is giving you. So after checking out a lot of motorcycle jeans, I was happy to find that IXS carries this fully protective 5-pocket jeans model. It has no zipper on the bottom and no connecting zipper for a jacket on the top, so they will be an excellent match to my new mesh summer jacket and citysmart-styled low boots.

The disadvantage of these trousers is that they only come in 1 length. Size medium was a good fit for me around the waist, but the legs are way too long. Also, the protectors in the knees are mounted so low that the top of the protectors jams just under my knee. The protectors are about 10cm too low and the legs of the trousers need to be shortened by 7cm. The protectors can be moved up to 4 cm higher in their pockets, so all that is needed is to make the protector pockets move up by 7cm and shorten the legs by 7cm.

When you turn the trousers inside-out, you see that you can not just cut away 7cm at the bottom. The bottom seam is holding the inner lining and is connected through a mesh to provide ventilation. On top of that, when we need to cut the sleeves that hold the knee armor, the lining will no longer be watertight, so it's time for a creative solution.

Here is what I did:

remove the protectors and pull the pants inside out

remove the stitching at the bottom of the legs
cut away 1cm of the legs at the bottom. The inner and outer leg are now separated
the inner leg still has the mesh fabric and 1cm of cordura attached to it. This is good. Move it up a bit so you can work on the outer fabric (which is now on the inside since the pants have bene turned inside out)
create a new seam of 6cm by folding over the cordura. Make sure this is straight.
pull down the inner sleeve over these 6cm and align the mesh fabric so it is in the same position relative to the new underside of the leg as it was before you started cutting things up (you can check on the other leg)
but some needle pins through the construction so everything remains in place
take a sewing needled and make big stitches. Small stitched take too long. I used the technique demonstrated in this video

when all is fine down below, you need to move up. Just above the knee armor pocket you want to fold 3,5cm of fabric onto itself. Just hold the fabric with your fingers and tuck in the 3,5cm all around. Then make sure you create a nice and straight fold all around the leg. The 3,5cm goes up and comes down again, so you evectively pulled the inner fabric the same 7cm higher as you shortened the outer leg.

now for stitching this tucked-in part you need to pay a little attention: don't stitch the inner fabric to the outer fabric. It will be uncomfortable to wear and you will see creasing on the outside. You have to try to stitch the inner fabric onto itself. The easiest way to do that is by folding the fabric back onto itself at the place where the double layer lays on top of the single layer of inner fabric. when you fold it back there, you have a ridge of 3 layers of fabric that you can hold into your hand sew with an overhand stitch just at the edge. If you don't make the stitched too tight, it will stretch out a bit and the fabric will lay flat again when you undo the fold. Make sure to put in enough needle pins before you start folding and sewing.

And voila, I'm happy with my 5-pocket styled motorcycle jeans, without the saftey worries of the cotton fabric of real jeans. It's a shame not more manufacturers offer this kind of pants and it is definately a shame that they don't come in different length sizes.

Check out the photo set on Flickr to get some detailed pictures.

Archos 7 HT hacking

2011-01-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

I recently bought the cheapest branded tablet on the market: the Archos 7 HT. With it's resistive touchscreen, slow CPU and Android 1.5 I wasn't expecting too much. Yet, with a few hacks it turned out to be a nice little machine.

The following features can be unlocked by installing a custom firmware from Archosfans.com:

access to the Market (lots of applications to install)
compatibility with all Google apps (Mail, calendar, contacts, chat, maps)
Background data auto-sync (besides Google also used by e.g. Twitter clients)
Much more room on the device to install applications (different partitioning)

I have shown the result of the upgrade for you in this video:
(also published on The Mobile Revolution)

The instruction in the ArchosFans Wiki are a bit wrong. If you follow them, you will brick your device (fear not: the process is reversible). The correct way to install the latest homebuilt image from "SamJr YAR!" is described by Robert Asticles in the forum and is repeated for you here below:

1. Push the trigger to the left. Select Shutdown to switch of your device.
2. Pull the trigger comletely to the right to lock your archos.
3. RESET your device !! (this important step is missing in the Wiki-Instructions)
4. Connect your device with the PC
5. Install the appropriate Driver in the RKAndroid package. It only works on a Windows 32-bit system.

6. start RKAndroid.exe and hope, that it sees your Device (text:" RKLoader device found")
7. Now select the Image ( .img ) file as "new firmware information"
8. Press RESTORE !! (Do NOT press UPDATE).
9. Anwer the next question with "YES" and WAIT........
10. When the Box "Finished" appers, choose OK and than EXIT.
11. Unplug your device and start it (push Trigger to the left and hol it there for a while)
12. Now wait, because the system is partitioning and formating. It can take up to 10 Minutes.
13. When everything is running, plug in your archos and select "Mount"(*) on the screen.
14. Wait, it can take some time until your windows recognizes your new enhanced archos.
15. If your run win7-64bit, there will be an new "archos 7" device asking for a driver. Unfortunately, there is
no 64-bit driver for this device. But it's not so important either.
14. Format your archos internal memory (not your SD-Card) as "Fat 32". Please no quickformat

Happy hacking!

A Helpdesk 2.0 proposal based on a close encounter with a Telenet bug

2011-01-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

More than about solving a specific technical problem with a service provider, this blog post is about how customers can become part of the helpdesk of an operator.

Summary (or skip to the conclusion about Helpdesk 2.0)

The Belgian ISP Telenet is providing an alert in the browser window of their customers to warn them if they approach the maximum volume of their internet subscription. A bug in this functionality can cause users to be blocked from internet access. When I encountered this problem myself, the helpdesk confirmed that it was a known bug. They could not solve it immediately but the account needed to be fixed by backoffice staff, who understandably don't work 24/7. Yet, I found a workaround that any customer can easily apply themselves. The question is now how the script that is used by Telenet helpdesk can be updated to include this workaround, to the benefit of both Telenet and its customers.

The technical nitty gritty:

1. The problem

To warn its users that they are approaching a volume limit in their subscription, Telenet is using an implicit proxy on the http connections of customers. When the alert is triggered, the proxy is serving a web page announcing the warning, whatever the url that the customer typed in the address bar of the browser. The proxy will only get out of the way when the user has confirmed he has seen the warning by clicking a confirm button.

Under the specific circumstance where a user has exceeded his volume limit, switched to "pay per use" and after that decided to purchase another volume bundle and the limit of this bundle reaches 80% and the total volume of the previously used volume under the "pay per use" scheme is larger than 20% of the bundle purchased, things go wrong. Apparently the algorithm that calculates the volume to be shown in the html page containing the warning for the user trows an exception in this specific case, stating that the volume should be 80% but that 100% is already reached. The result is that users see the following 500 error page is shown to the customer:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/5307181170/

Now I can't imagine this to be a difficult bug to fix, but I also understand there are strict release procedures for this type of software, so sometimes it is good to put a workaround in place at the helpdesk level.

2. The workaround of the helpdesk

When contacting the helpdesk about the problem above, they confirm there is a known bug in the http redirect towards the warning page. The workaround that they currently use is to assign an extra order for a volume bundle to the customer. This increases the amount of volume that is available, making sure the code to show the warning page no longer triggers. However, the assignment of the bundle was also blocked and could only be handled once in 24 hours. The friendly and knowledgeable helpdesk staff had no other option then escalate the ticket and hope that a backoffice engineer would solve the ticket faster then 24 hours.

3. The workaround used by me.

I checked out the screen that Telenet provides you to configure your warnings. My first reaction was to deselect all checkboxes that say "show me a message on the screen". But this didn't work, probably since the trigger to show the message had already been placed and could only be cleared by clicking on the "confirm" button in the warning page (which couldn't be shown because of the exception).

My second try solved the problem: i selected all checkboxes stating "show me a message on the screen" and I disabled the pay per use mode (opting for the "reduced speed" mode instead). This caused another path in the code to trigger another warning page, which was shown in my browser when I tried to pull up a webpage. This showed me a working warning page, in which I could press the confirm button. The warning went away, and I was back to surfing at full speed.

My conclusion: It's time for Helpdesk 2.0

As a user, I was happy to find a solution to my problem. But I would be even happier if I could share this solution with other users (which is why I'm writing this blog post). And I would be absolutely proud if Telenet would acknowledge that I did some good work here and look at my solution or even approve it. What is more, I would feel part of Telenet if they would take up my solution in their script, faq, wiki, website or other tool. I would no longer be talking about "they", but about "we" when referring to Telenet.

That to me is the basis of what I like to call Helpdesk 2.0. It can be started using simple tools:

put your call center scripts, knowledge base and incident list online. Yes, publicly.
start a Wiki that can be edited by everyone. Let helpdesk staff refer customers to the Wiki whenever they have suggestions or when users have questions that go beyond what is needed to solve the problem at hand.
add a messageboard (or even better: use a Facebook forum) to your site where users can discuss their problems.

The result is that users will start to rely on each other for common problems that affect multiple users. This will not only unload the helpdesk, but it will also be a piece of mind for users to know they can rely on their peers. Non-customers will want to join in and become a customer to become a member of the community.

When you work together with users in this way and you stimulate them and provide incentives for working together, you will move towards a cocreation organisation. Cocreation is not about involving a focus group to determine product features, but it is about evolving towards a decentralized organisation.

If you want to know more about this topic, take a look at what www.MedeMerkers.be can do for you or follow @MedeMerkers on Twitter.

End of 2010. Is mobile internet hot in Belgium?

2010-12-27T03:19:00.000-08:00

End of 2010. Is mobile internet hot in Belgium? Kind of. Hot, but only just preparing for takeoff.

Last week I interviewed a student about her mobile phone usage. She didn't use internet on her phone and neither did her friends. Yes, iPhones are sexy, but relatively few young people are buying them.

On the other hand, popular media and television shows are picking up on mobile internet and are helping to evangelize people on what mobile internet is good for. In the last episode of the popular sitcom "FC De Kampioenen" one of the younger characters (Ronald) pulls out an iPhone and demonstrates how he can see a TV show with it via Youtube and Facebook. An older character (Xavier) is amazed and yet another older guy (Fernand) also wants to get mobile internet because of what he sees. Watch the scene from 8:20 to 8:48. (hat tip @elidesc)

This is an excellent illustration of how WoM (Word of Mouth) works for products and propositions that are difficult to explain, but easy to graps once you see them in action. Now that people are seeing mobile internet in action, they will quickly adopt mobile internet on the fancy smartphone they found under the Christmas tree.

Better grip on snow with rear wheel traction cars

2010-12-23T07:41:00.000-08:00

I happen to like rear wheel drive cars. But when the roads are covered with snow, they quickly loose all traction, causing you to get stuck. Luckily, there is a simple solution.

After 3 days of winter driving I got fed up of asking people to push my car. The first thing you do on a slippery surface in a BMW, Lexus or Mercedes with RWD is of course turn of the ESP. By disabling the electronic stability controls you regain a direct link between your gas pedal and your engine, so you can give the car enough wheelspin to get it moving in the snow.

But this will often not be enough. What you really need to do is get more weight over the rear axle. I did this by buying 200kg of sand and putting that in the trunk, all the way to the rear. At the same time, I lowered my tire pressure from 3.1kg to 2.5kg. Mind you: this is for a wide and low profile sports tire. For a normal tire the recommended pressure will be much lower. Lowering the pressure means having more surface area in contact with the snow.

The difference is enormous! I haven't gotten stuck anymore since loading the sand in the trunk. Even in deep snow where some front wheel drive vehicles are suffering I can easily break away. Sometimes I need to rock back and forth a little to gain momentum, but I always manage to get moving. The only disadvantage is less grip on the front wheels, so be careful when cornering whilst accelerating.

Of course you can achieve an even more dramatic improvement by fitting winter tyres. On my BMW 5 series with 17inch rims I fitted winter tyres and those are simply awesome. But for my Lexus IS220 winter tyres were not available due to a shortage in the already rare combination of wide 18inch rear wheels with narrower front wheels.

But 200kg of sand for a total cost of €11,28 keep me happy for now!

How some manufacturers refuse to accept the reality of the internet

2010-12-22T00:16:00.000-08:00

10 years ago we installed an expensive garagedoor opener from Hörmann. After 5 years, the handheld remote controls died but were never replaced. Today I set out to find a new set.

Replacement devices for my handheld transmitters on the old 40Mhz frequency were no longer available. An OEM replacement kit with 2 transmitters and a receiver on the newer frequency of 433Mhz costed more then €200. I went over to eBay and a few minutes later came up with a similar set for €40. Even better: this set included a second channel that allowed me to use the remotes to also switch on the garage lights after opening the garage door.

It is strange to see how old world manufacturers keep trying to ignore the reality of the internet and continue to push products through high margin distribution channels that add no value. Apparently, the fear for change is so big that they choose to silently disappear instead of embracing e-commerce.

Video editing with Samsung HMX-H100

2010-05-10T03:45:00.000-07:00

I recently bought myself a full HD Samsung videocamera. The model name is HMX-H100. Similar models include H104, H105 and H106, with the only difference being the amount of on-board memory.

One of the reasons I chose this camera is that is saves in a standard MP4 H264 format instead of the proprietary AVCHD container. However, it seems like none of the major programs can edit the files. And the included Samsung NLE software is useless since it crashes once you load more then a few clips.

What I want is very simple:

Combine all video clips to 1 file without re-encoding (in 1 step, please)
Trim the begin and end of this file and save without transcoding
Save a second copy encoded with a lower bitrate in H264/MP4 for Youtube upload

After a long search, I finally found the tools to achieve this in an easy way with open source software. I list them here for you.

MP4cam2AVI
This program allows you to put the existing H264 stream that sits inside a MP4 container in an AVI container. First you have to check the "expert" option and then you can choose "direct stream copy", allowing you to save to AVI without re-encoding. I tend to direct stream copy the video but to re-encode the audio to "lame high quality". The reason is that the audio codec used by Samsung causes problems for Windows DirectShow programs (like Media Player) when wrapped inside an AVI.
If you have multiple clips (the Samsung HMX-H105 savesevery take in it's own file) you can choose the "convert & join" option to output everything as 1 AVI file.

Virtualdub
A long-time favorite of mine. I didn't use it for a long time, but it comes in very handy to trim of the start and end of the AVI clip. Remember to check "direct stream copy" in the "video" and "audio" menu. Then just do "set selection start", "set selection end" and "crop to selection". Use "save as" to save the cropped AVI without recoding.

MPEG streamclip
To transcode the file to a lower bitrate MP4, I use MPEG streamclip. This very simple program (just 1 file) does the job without hassle.
On most occasions you can also open up the MP4 directly from the HMX camera (skipping the MP4cam2AVI and VirtualDub steps), trim it in MPEG streamclip and save it again without recoding.
I have abandonned this method in my workflow for 2 reasons:

some of the clips of the Samsung HMX are not readable by MPEG streamclip (noticeably when the camera overflows a long recording after 1.8GB)
most of the time I want to combine a lot of short takes into 1 long file, something only the MP4cam2AVI can do for me.

What puzzles me is that Samsung does not take the time to find out how their camera's can work with simple open source software like the programs mentioned above. Instead they devote their budget to a crappy piece of software which crashes so often that it is impossible to use.

If you benefit from my findings above, leave a short note in the comments.

Plugg 2010: European startups get moving

2010-03-11T23:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended the Plugg 2010 conference. The theoretical observations of previous years have been replaced by concrete actions and practical advice. Good thing to see our European startups getting serious about business.

Plugg is a conference that combines a list of top-notch speakers with a start-up rally. Startups that are selected for the conference can present themselves in front of the audience and VC's. The best startup receives a monetary price and eternal fame.

"We will set up", "Our idea is", "Be believe that" or even "Research shows" used to be the most common opening lines of startups pitching their new business. The wording already implies that a considerable amount of thinking and analysis has been done, but execution is yet to be started.

The value of any idea is only as good as it's execution. And that is where this year's startups really shined: Of the 19 startups that presented themselves, each and everyone of them had a product to show. A working product that demonstrated their idea. Sometimes it was not yet polished, sometimes it was not yet generally available. But what counts is that there is a first version that clearly demonstrates where the startup is going to.

The winner selected by the audience is Razwar, a cool new shaving brand. Their social media strategy already got them a nice start in the market. By mentioning they want to deliver "shaving as a service", they sure won a lot of votes from the attendees.

The professional VC jury selected fits.me as a winner. Fits.me supplies online clothing retailers with a robotic fitting doll. the robot adjusts itself to thousands of different shapes and sizes to imitate anyone's body contours. The idea is that an automated photo shoot results in thousands of photos of every clothing item. The customer then enters his body measurements in the merchant's website and all clothing pictures directly reflect how the item will look on the customer's body. The idea is that this not only increases sales, but also eliminates a lot of returns.

Organiser @robinwauters did a great job in organising the conference and the photos taken by @pietel and @dipfico went online near real-time. Even the videos of presentations were immediately available on Vimeo. Maybe the sponsors could have been highlighted a bit more, or maybe it was just me not paying enough attention.

I was very happy to have been invited by @ftack from sponsor Nomadesk. Nomadesk is a cloud-based file server that includes sharing, synchronizing and backup. You always have a copy of your network drive present on your local hard drive. And when you change files off line, they are synced in the background once you connect to the network again. Nomadesk is for small and medium enterprises what Dropbox is for individuals: magic in the cloud that makes your life easier.

Networking opportunities on the floor were great too, I went home with a lot of partnership opportunities for our Mobile Vikings. Sad to have missed out on the "Belgian Beers" after-party, since I know Robin Wauters is a great host for these kind of parties!

Inbox zero is too much work

2010-03-05T01:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I surpassed the number of 10.000 unread emails in my mailbox. Some people might think this is a sign of bad email hygiene. Nothing is further from the truth. Let me explain you my system.

Inbox zero

The classical "inbox zero" method tells you to:

delete
delegate
respond
defer
do

That's too much work in my book. The way I work goes like:

ignore (by scrolling by, deleting takes effort so I don't do that - this is +/- 80%)
forward/reply (that's right: this is the delegate/respond part)
do (if it can't be done in < 5 minutes, it goes to the agenda - yes I use that one as my to do list as well)

I realize I'm doing exactly the same as the "inbox zero" method promotes. But I am using a much simpler technological way to identify the actionable messages.

I never delete an email. I never tag or classify an email. I never use email folders. I never use priorities.

My system is very simple. I regard email as a message stream passing by. I start reading the stream at the most recent message that is marked as read. All older messages are by definition ignored, I consider them my archive. Reading the stream = reading the titles. I only open about 20% of the emails.

2 mailboxes does the trick

I have 2 email boxes: private and work. Actually, it's not private and work. The private mailbox receives informational and conversation email: mailings, status updates, notifications, account registrations, etc. The work mailbox receives actionable email: questions from people, reports sent to me, meeting requests, etc.

Let's illustrate with my private mailbox as an example:

You will notice that most of the messages in this inbox are machine-generated. This is why I use 2 mailboxes: The informational / conversational mail requires a different approach from the actionable mail.

When we look at the actionable ("work") mailbox, it looks a little different:

If the message is "read", it means it is handled. If I still need to do something with a message, I keep it unread. There are never more then a few unread messages in my inbox. They are never more then a few days old. (in fact, right after taking this screenshot, I handled the unread message). Again, if it takes more then 5 minutes, it goes to my private agenda.

So the only difference in handling my work mailbox as opposed to my private mailbox is that I make sure every message gets marked as read. I don't actually read all those mails, to me it just means "this is processed". In my private email, the fact that there is an email marked as read to me means all emails below it are considered processed. The reason for this different behavior is that the percentage of mail that requires action is much higher in my work mailbox then in my private mailbox. It is just a different visual clue to identify what messages still need action.

Mobile changes the game: stop doing the check-twice-a-day thing

One thing to realize is that since we got direct push mail on our mobiles, it has actually become much easier to follow the message stream of emails. As long as you keep the hygiene mentioned above (read email = handled email) you can check email throughout the day whenever suits you (in boring meetings, in the elevator, in the kitchen, etc.).

I didn't check my email whilst writing this article. But I will mark a couple emails as read before switching to the next activity on my agenda. This is not endangering my productivity, since it doesn't interfere with a task.

Therefore, I discourage the practice of reading email only twice a day. It causes other people to retry their communication with less efficient technological means (phonecalls, or -God forbid- voicemail) which means in the end we all lose.

Check your messages and do it regularly, whether you call it email, twitter or MSN.

New website for Delmot

2010-02-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I made a new website for Delmot (www.del-mot.be). It's another example of how fast you can create something nice with Drupal.

The template is purchased from www.templatemonster.com for a meager 55 USD. I was surprised to even find Cufon font substitution correctly used in the template. The default CSS classes for the Drupal basic content types where installed, although some hardlinks had to be adapted in the CSS to correctly implement the included menu icons. (yes I know those need to be replaced with something more meaningfull someday).

The Drupal installation is as standard as can be, with only the Imagecache module installed to correctly resize the project images. Instead of using views/cck to construct my project list, I just used the standard blog and formatted the content appropriately by quickly adding a "left column" and "right column" div in the CSS. I then entered the project descriptions in full HTML with my own markup instead of filtered HTML. At the suggestion of @litrik I also added the Pathauto module to ensure URL's are human readable, which is also better for SEO.

Since the site only is in 1 language, I misused the translation feature of Drupal to rename all references to "blog" into "project list", a much quicker and easier way then implementing a custom content type. "Project list" is now the Dutch translation of "Koen's Blog" and the site is switched to Dutch. Thanks to all of my shortcuts, most of the day was spent creating content, with the actual website construction, CSS editing and Drupal configuration and deployment only taking a few hours.

Back me up, scotty!

2010-02-19T07:41:00.000-08:00

Since a few months I'm running a VPS with a couple of hosted accounts on it. I just wanted to share my cheap, simple and robust backup solution.
The people of XLSHosting not only provide a wonderfull VPS service, they also provide a backup solution for your complete VPS. This is not what I will be discussing. I do however want to give them the credit for showing me the way to their backup script, normally intended for their own backup solution

Home-based backup

My goal was to backup everything on my VPS to my home. Diskspace is cheap, so I wanted to keep as much server history as possible on a USB harddisk. As it happens, I already am running a fileserver / printer server at home. It's an old EEE PC running on windows XP.

The backup configuration scenario is as follows:

install rsync on your home windows machine with cwrsync
make sure you generate an ssh keypair on your windows machine for the VPS server and install it.
check that you can ssh from your VPS server to your home windows machine without having to provide a password. If you need to provide a password, you have made an error in installing the ssh keypair
now upload your backup script. Of course you need to customize this.
add an nightly entry in your crontab to dump your MySql databases to a file on the server
add a second entry in your crontab (which executes later during the night then the DB dump) to execute the backup script
check your email in the morning to see if all went well

My customisations

In the backup script below, there are 2 important customisations I made. The first one is that I have the result of the backup emailed to me including a summary of the data. The second one is that I choose to only copy files that don't exist yet on the target machine. This works with hardlinks and apparently it even works when the backup target is an NTFS partition, cool.

This is the output of the email I receive:



Fri Feb 19 03:01:01 CET 2010

dagelijkse backup voor dag 19 van maand 2, weekdag 5, naar daily/5

Directory voor deze backup: VPSbackup-daily/5/

Directory als basis voor incremental linken: ../../VPSbackup-daily/4/



Number of files: 7782

Number of files transferred: 3

Total file size: 66536313 bytes

Total transferred file size: 1178442 bytes

Literal data: 3345 bytes

Matched data: 1175097 bytes

File list size: 181673

File list generation time: 0.077 seconds

File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds

Total bytes sent: 189594

Total bytes received: 6656



sent 189594 bytes  received 6656 bytes  5528.17 bytes/sec

total size is 66536313  speedup is 339.04

Backup klaar.

Fri Feb 19 03:01:37 CET 2010

This is how my crontab looks:



01 1 * * * wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.dothisforeachsite.be/cron.php

01 2 * * * /home/dothisforeachcustomeraccount/public_html/sites/default/backup.sh

01 3 * * * /root/xlsbackup 2>&1 | mail -s 'Backup report VPS server' youremail@yourdomain.com

This is how my backup scripts looks



#!/bin/bash

WEKEN=4

MAANDEN=12

H=VPSbackup

WEEKDAY=$(date +%u)                       # 1-7

MONTHDAY=$(date +%d | sed s/^0\\+// )     # 1-31

MONTH=$(date +%m | sed s/^0\\+//)         # 01-12

WEEK=$(date +%U | sed s/^0\\+// )         # 00-53

if [ $WEEKDAY = 1 ]

then

PREVDAY=6 

else

PREVDAY=$[WEEKDAY-1]

fi

MSG="daily backup for day $MONTHDAY of month $MONTH, weekday $WEEKDAY, to daily/$WEEKDAY"

DIR=$H-daily/$WEEKDAY/

PREVDIR=../../$H-daily/$PREVDAY/

if [ $WEEKDAY = 7 ]

then

N=$[WEEK%WEKEN]

MSG="weekly backup for week $WEEK to weekly/$N"

DIR=$H-weekly/$N/

fi

if [ $MONTHDAY = 1 ]

then

N=$[MONTH%MAANDEN]

MSG="monthly backup for month $MONTH to monthly/$N"

DIR=$H-monthly/$N/

fi

echo $(date) 

echo $MSG

echo Directory for backup: $DIR

echo Directory as base for incremental linking: $PREVDIR

rsync --stats -e 'ssh -p 23576 -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa.backupscriptkey' --link-dest=$PREVDIR --delete -ax --exclude stats --exclude logs --exclude tmp --exclude imap /home yourusername@yourhomedomainwithdyndyns.dyndns.org:$DIR 2>&1

echo Backup ready.

echo $(date)

Now that also in Belgium the download limits on broadband connections are dissapearing, this is a very good remote backup solution that can be used by anyone that needs to backup a server.

Guest post: Jonathan Slenders on CSS

2010-02-09T01:34:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I wrote my idea's on how I would expect CSS to work. Jonathan is much more knowledgeable on the subject and wrote me a very interesting and insightful response. Since it was too long for the comments section, we decided to post it here as a guest post.

To begin with, use { display: inline; } instead of { float: left; } for the horizontal menu.

I understand your argument that a designer should be able to write his style sheet independent from the HTML to which it eventually will be applied. Working this way, would however require a third mark-up language to define the matches between the HTML elements and the style. But because a designer usually wants to see his changes in the CSS directly reflected in the resulting page in the browser; it causes that he too will need to maintain that third file. Too much overhead, in my opinion.

CSS should be applied directly to the HTML, and the designer should have knowledge of the HTML structure. I'd say, if the structure of HTML documents didn't change as often as they do in reality; it wouldn't be bad to write the structure conventions in an XML schema (or DTD-like format).

You say "I think the programmer should not be aware of the CSS class structure that the designer will use". It's weird, because it's actually the person who writes the HTML, who is responsable for choosing appropriate class names.
In my opinion, the most important guideline here is to use semantic class names.
Never write
<div class="italic"> text</div>

This requires not only a superfluous CSS rule: .italic{font-style:italic;}, but also moves styling back to the original HTML like it was years ago. Even, <i>text</i> or
<div font-style="italic">
text</div>
would be better, because they tell the same, but don't depend on a redundant CSS rule. There is a reason why the text has to be italic, maybe because it has to be emphasized or because it's a news title, use that as a classname.
<div class="newstitle">
or </div>
<div class="emphasize">
are much better. (Though, I would replace the latter with <em>text</em>, the HTML element reserved for emphasized text.) In CSS we can then write .newstitle{font-style:italic;}.</div>

You came up with "inherit: .horizontal-menu;" to avoid redundancy. It can already be avoided, and the recommended way to to so is by using a comma-separated list of selectors like:

p.class1,
p.class2,
p.class3 { color: blue; font-size: 120%; }

This avoids declaring three times the same for each element. Unfortunately, this syntax forces the design declaration of class1, class2 and class3 to be in the same place. This could become hard to maintain, in larger CSS files. For instance, I usually group all the styling for news items together, the styling for blog entries together, etc... But suppose that a small part of a news items needs to have the same styling as a small part of the blog, there's no way to keep on that CSS structure.
Therefore, I defenitely see the advantage of your "inherit: .horizontal-menu". However, this syntax could result in obiguous declarations without proper priority rules. The current priority order is already complicated (inline CSS has priority over document level CSS, which has prority over external included CSS. The order of the rules is also of importance, and finally the "!important" declaration gets priority over everything. More specific matches like "body p" could also ofter get priority over a simple "p".) I guess that adding inheritance your way would even more layout declarations to be combined: those of all the parent nodes (e.g. in case of color:inherit), the inline declarations, document CSS, external CSS, all the inherited CSS declarations. I would design CSS like this:

%horizontal-menu { display: inline; }
.my-main-menu { inherit: %horizontal-menu; }

Similar to yours, except %horizontal-menu is never applied directly to any HTML element, it shouldn't match any class name, and is used like a preprocessor to the interpreter.

There are probably enough discussions about what's wrong with CSS, it shouldn't have been flat and CSS selectors should've been replaced with XPath. But this is the way HTML and CSS work are historically grown. The first designs were pure HTML. Positioning was always done with tables. Colors, font-styles and other styling was done by adding styling tags to the HTML. (e.g.
<div color="red" font="Arial">
text</div>
) It feels to me like CSS was designed to avoid repeating this layout tags on every single HTML element, but it didn't ever intend to totally separate the design from the data.
It happens too often that I need to rewrite my HTML to get a specific design. For instance, if I want to create a nice border around the site by using 8 background-images (one for each corner, one repeated for each side), I always end up nesting eight divs like
<div class="container1">
<div class="container2">
... </div>
</div>
and use one
<div>
for each background image.

Finally, a perfect website should be like:
html = data
css = design
javascript = behavior

and classnames are used to glue these together. But because of the limitations of CSS, desigers have to adjust the HTML to get their CSS working.

Google Nexus One Android: 5 things to die for, 5 things to cry for

2010-01-31T07:55:00.000-08:00

After 5 years of Windows Mobile, this is my first Google phone. The Nexus One is better than anything that came before it, but it can still be improved.

This review is written on the Nexus One after my first weekend with it. Besides the various Windows Mobile phones that I used over the years, I have the habit of taking a different phone with me on each yearly holiday. In this way I have played with the likes of Nokia N95, iPhone, LG Cookie, etc.

Summary

This is the best smartphone on the market. It is fast, good looking and it has a rich feature set. It is the first phone that gives truly usable access to regular websites. I can just surf to blogger and type this review, right in the built in browser. What makes it stand out is that everything in and around the device is designed for each other, something that up till now only Apple succeeded in.

The review

Yes, the screen is marvelous, the voice search is amazing and it is stupid that you have to click a little bit above the hardware buttons in order not to miss them. I will not elaborate on that. There are already tons of reviews discussing those properties. Instead, I will present you with 5 good and 5 bad properties that might not be so obvious at first glance.

5 things to die for

1. Usablity
I'll start by telling you this is a very intuitive device to use. Yesterday I was visting friends who had just bought an iPod Touch. They formed the ideal test audience, since they didn't have any previous exeperience with neither an iPhone or an Android device. They made less mistakes on the Nexus. The iPhone left them more puzzled when something didn't work out like they expected. In brief, they found the Nexus easier to use.
Of course, most people will tell you the opposite. It is normal that when you are used to one way of working (be it iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian or Blackberry) that having to change your habits is difficult at first. But for someone who has not yet developed a habit, the outcome will be different.

2. Speed
Can you say blazingly fast? This phone responds faster then anything before it. It absolutely rocks. No matter how many applications you open (yes, it does do multitasking) it remains just as fast. For a device that is used for short periods of interaction this makes a very important difference. It is faster then an iPhone, and it certainly is faster then my Tytn 2.

3. The Nipple
I don't how what the official name is for the protrusion at the bottom of the the phone that is used to navigate around the screen, but let's call it "The Nipple". I read some people find this an unnecessary device and would prefer the inverse-optical-mouse of the yet to be released HTC Bravo. I couldn't disagree more. I very much like the haptic feedback that this controller gives you when scrolling around the screen. It is made of a sort of sticking material that grips your skin when you move over it. The feedback you get gives you much more accuracy in your movement then what you get from a flat, frictionless controller. I use it a lot for one handed operation. When you're reading a website without zooming in (yes, the high-res screen makes this entirely possible) it is much easier to use the controller to select a button then to hunt around with your fingers pecking on the screen.

4. Camera
This is not the best cameraphone. Sony still rules in that department. But it is a major step up from what we have seen before with HTC and on the iPhone. Compare to the latter, the addition of the flash makes all the difference in the world. Below you can see an image I took at a birthday party. It was completly dark when they brought in the birthday cake. The only illumination you see is from the candle and the built in flash. The image is not perfect and I would perfer less noise. But I managed to get a usable image that reflects the atmosphere and that is what counts in casual photography.

5. Marketplace
You can argue that Apple's Appstore has far more applications than Google's Marketplace. On the day where I compared the iPhone to the Nexus with my test-audience, we downloaded more then 50 applications on the Nexus and none on the iPhone. Why? Simple. The Nexus presents you with a lot of good and free applications. Whereas the iPhone presents you with mostly paying applications without a try-before-you-buy model. This makes the Marketplace a lot more attractive to endusers, which in the end will inevitably mean that there will be a stronger ecosystem around it and better applications generating more revenue.

5 things to cry for

1. Email
Yes, you can have Microsoft Exchange and Gmail mail pushed to your device. But both Blackberry and Windows Mobile manage this better. There is, for example, no way to tag multiple emails and delete them all at once. I'll probably look out for a better email client over the next week. But for most users, the built in capability will be OK.

2. Keyboard
There is no keyboard. The on screen keyboard and word suggestions work remarkably well, but I can type faster on a real keyboard. On the other hand, as a keyboardless device, the Nexus is a lot sleeker then my former Tytn II. I will probably get faster at using the on screen keyboard, but I will keep wondering if a Droid wouldn't have been a better choice for me. Like with cars, you don't buy a phone based on pure specs. The feeling and X-factor of the device certainly have to be taken into account (and the Droid is butt-ugly).

3. Default Homescreen
Don't get me wrong. The 5 homescreens that can be populated with icon's and widgets are a blessing. But why not already populate them with interesting presets, instead of putting seemingly random icons on them? Another thing I will never understand is why Google picked the annoying and ugly "Nexus neural network" live wallpaper. This will put off so many users. I quickly switched to the "Grass" background, giving a subtle effect that also gets darker when the night falls, reminding you it is time to go to bed.

4.Power Button
Packed with this much technology, I can't understand why there needs to be a power button. I would much prefer to just unlock the device with a swipe across the screen. Instead, I now have to press the power button and then unlock the device. A unnecessary two-step procedure.

5. Multi Touch
Google should not have left out multi touch features in the UI of the home screen, browser and media gallery. I understand the device hardware has the functionality and you can unlock the software to use it. If there is a patent problem with Apple, solve it. But please, don't make users jump through hoops to get where they want to. BTW, I kind of like the double-tap to zoom in (just like in Opera Mobile) and the +/- buttons to zoom a picture. But I feel that multitouch will be essential for other applications so it should have been clear from the start that this is a genuine multi touch device.

PS: Pictures are available on my Flickr account with the tag Nexus under a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license

Common CSS bug with viewport scrolling

2010-01-29T02:17:00.000-08:00

I just discovered a CSS bug in our new website www.mobilife.be. You might want to check out your own websites too, since this bug appears to be present in a lot of sites.

How to check if your website suffers from the viewport scrolling bug?

1) Open your site in a browser window that is wider then the minimum width of your design

2) resize the window so the site no longer fits in it. You now have a horizontal scrollbar

3) scroll to the right

If some of your site elements are "cut off" like the black background of the header bar in the Mobilife screenshot above, your website suffers from this bug.

To give an example of a website that is impacted more severly by this bug, check out these screen shots of the Pukkelpop website below. The whole body of the website is cut off beyond the viewport width.

(note: Pukkelpop is a fantastic site developed by the great people of Inventis. It just shows that even the best sometimes make small mistakes. I'm sure they'll have it corrected by the time you read this)

If you want to know how to solve this bug, browse to Mobilife and check out the CSS. You'll see we (or at least @ingo) solved it elegantly by adding a min width property to the containers DIV contained in the body and putting the width to 100%. This solves the problem in all browsers.

The Apple tablet will be circular!

2010-01-26T23:53:00.000-08:00

Early pictures from the preparation of today's press conference have revealed a shocking truth: The tablet computer that Apple will reveal in a few hours is not square or rectangular, but completely circular!

It is a very logic step when you come to think of it. Apple has always tried to give us a more intuitive user experience. Nothing is more intuitive than holding a circle. The circular tablet will have position sensors so the image will always be upright, no matter how you hold it. It will use it's motion sensors so you will be able to scroll by simply rotating your tablet. And, best of all, the user interface will feature round icons that pop up around the edges of the circle.

The Pie

The first model that will be released will be the Apple Pie. It will be 0.8 inch thick, but in exchange for this thickness it will hold a DVD reader in the back. It is also equipped with a 2 TB harddisk and a non-replaceble battery that should hold up to 2 days of normal usage.
The Pie will be a real family oriented device. It will have pressure sensors on the bottom so you can use it like a Wii balance board. Games and advanced applications like a weight scale will be available over you iTunes Circle account.

The Pancake

The second model will be released in the spring an will be called the Apple Pancake. It will be an incredible 0.2 inch thin! Of course, no harddrive or DVD player will be present.
The battery will only be good for 3 hours of use, but it will recharge in it's docking station in less then an hour. The Pancake's docking station will be wall-mountable so you can attach it in your bathroom in place of a mirror. That's right: watch the latest news headlines whilst brushing your teeth.

Availability: the Circle

To keep up with Google's innovative go-to market model for the Nexus One, Apple will also revolutionise the distribution model for the Apple Pie and Apple Pancake. You will only be able to buy the tablets if you join The Circle.

The Circle is Apple's premium membership program. Joining The Circle will be free for everyone. However, you have to agree to the Code, which is a special code of conduct to ensure Apple Pie and Pancake owners use their devices with dignity. One element of this Code is that members will donate a small fee of 1% of their monthly income to The Circle. This will be used to further fund the evangelization of Pie and Pancake that is needed to let The Circle succeed.

If you want to sign up for early bird membership in The Circle, we're giving away a Circle invite code for the first 1000 people who register at Mobile Vikings.

Photo resize for dummies

2010-01-20T02:07:00.000-08:00

I discovered a nice tool to do 1-click batch image resizes.
On http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize you can download an executable called PhotoResize400.exe. Put it on your desktop and drop a folder on it. When you open the folder, you will discover that every picture in it has been duplicated and resized to 400 pixels on its longest edge.

My first idea was: how boring. You can't even resize to another dimension. Here comes the surprise: rename the executable to PhotoResize1600.exe, and pics will be resized to 1600 pixels. How ingenious! I really like this way of setting application parameters, it's immediately visible in the executable name itself. On the author's website you find further customisation options that you can use in the executable name.
Of course, many of you will argue that command line tools like Imagemagick provide far more flexibility. But for non-technical people it is much easier to just drop a folder on an executable and be done with it. In fact, I discovered this tool when one of my website customers complained that she couldn't upload her 10 megapixel images onto her website. For people like that, this tool is ideal

CSS class inheritance: the way I would expect it to work

2009-12-17T03:51:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: I am a CSS newbie. So don't take this blogpost as an expert opinion. On the other hand, that gives me the unique point of view of someone with no predispositions on how things should work.

The problem

In my opinion, the purporse of CSS is to free the programmer from layout issues whilst keeping the freedom of layout with the designer. The way this works is as follows:

The programmer writes code that outputs HTML, eg:

<div class="foo">
<p class="bar">
Hello, world. This is a very short paragraph!
</p>
</div>

The designer then can make sure this looks nice without having to touch the html, like:

.foo {
  background-color: white;
  color: black;
}

.bar {
  background-color: inherit;
  color: inherit;
  font-weight: normal;
}

What bothers me with that?

Well, I think the programmer should not be aware of the CSS class structure that the designer will use or is using. Imagine a programmer making a main menu:


<div class="my-main-menu">
<ul>
<li>butter</li>
<li>cheese</li>
<li>eggs</li>
</ul>
</div>

The designer might like to use a CSS structure like:

.menu {
  background-color: white;
  color: black;
}

.horizontal-menu {
  float: left;
}

Suppose the designer wants to lay out the main menu as a horizontal menu. This requires him to write the following CSS code:

.my-main-menu {
  background-color: white;
  color: black;
  float: left;
  font-size: larger;
}

What I would like him to write is something like:

.my-main-menu {
  inherit: .horizontal-menu;
  font-size: larger;
}

What he needs to do with the way CSS is currently working:

1) he needs to write the custom site code:

.custom-menu-extension {
  font-size: larger;
}

2) he needs to tell the programmer what classes to use:

<div class="menu horizontal-menu custom-menu-extension">
<ul>
<li>butter</li>
<li>cheese</li>
<li>eggs</li>
</ul>
</div>

This approach violates the very idea of separating code and design. There is a tradeoff between either giving up your "modular" css structure or giving up separation between code and layout.

The solution

As you see above, I would add an "inherit" property to a class. This would include the definition of the inherited class to the newly defined class. In this way, programmers would only need to assign 1 class to each piece of content (instead of the clutter of divs / class names we see in current HTML). Designers could then declare that class using their favorite CSS framework as a basis and expand it with the specific properties for the given content and website.

Of course I could be missing the point, since my CSS experience is very limited. I'dd like to get more suggestions in the comments.